Housing.com to lay-off 600 employees in next 3 months

A management representative at Housing said the company was laying off 160 employees in noncore businesses that it plans to shut. The threeyear-old startup employs about 2,600 people.Aditi Shrivastava&Krithika Krishnamurthy | ET Bureau | August 10, 2015, 08:40 IST

Target India is laying off 180 employees in its Bengaluru centre as the US retailer undertakes a global restructuring with the objective of saving $2 billion in the next two years. (Representative image)BENGALURU: Realty portal Housing.com plans to lay off at least 600 employees in the next three months, as it steps up focus on its core technology and product and tightens its cash burn, according to several people familiar with developments at the company.

"Housing is being completely restructured and performance for each employee across departments is being (scrutinised)," said a top executive at the company, which in July fired cofounder and former CEORahul Yadav for bad behaviour after months of chaos.

"While some people have been asked to leave because businesses are being shut down, others because of underperformance and in some cases due to overstaffing," this person said.

A management representative at Housing said the company was laying off 160 employees in noncore businesses that it plans to shut. The threeyear-old startup employs about 2,600 people.

After the recent upheavals in its top management, Mumbai-based Housing.com has increased focus on revenue-generation and building an advertisement business. It has shut its commercial properties, short stays and land businesses and streamlined focus on large cities and towns while ceasing operations in smaller cities.

"The plan is to make the model much more skeletal. Internally, there is going to be a lot of churn on the product side as well," said one of the persons familiar with the developments.Another person said Housing is laying off underperformers in its engineering and product divisions and has fired operations staff it had hired for expanding to new cities. All the people who spoke on the layoffs at Housing declined to be identified.

Housing is currently managed by an executive committee that controls its finances and operations. The committee is led by Jonathan Bullock, who represents majority shareholder SoftBank on the board of Housing. Rishabh Gupta, interim CEO and chief operating officer, Housing's first angel investor Haresh Chawla and chief technical officer Abhishek Anand are also in the committee.

Housing—which competes with CommonFloor, 99Acres and MagicBricks, owned by the publisher of this paper—has so far raised more than Rs 760 crore ($120 million) in funding and is valued at over Rs 1,500 crore. It was founded in 2012 by a dozen college-mates from IIT-Mumbai. Four of them, including Yadav, have now left the company.